William McNeil, Plagues & Peoples: This had a kind of revelatory quality to me, the idea that everything you thought was important about history was actually kind of trivial and the real determinants of human destiny are something else entirely.

Here's a quiet little poem by one of my favorite poets, Eamon Grennan, which demonstrates, in its patient, painterly way, how an accumulation of sense-based details can develop a kind of revelatory momentum.

The latter half of Cult of Flesh is basically a series of sexual encounters that are "revelatory" in the worst sense--in the sense that they prompt the characters to spout long passages at each other that blend faux-Satanism with poor paraphrases of Norman O.